Blindsided (2 page)

And now he had to listen to
this
, and he had to push the image of Ashley’s ass out of his head because if he didn’t, he found himself thinking about what it would look like framed between his palms. He found himself fixing on slick, glistening heat, slapping skin, moaning Ashley, and he couldn’t.

He
couldn’t
.

He wouldn’t.

But he did. God, he did, over and over again until his stomach hurt and he thought he might be the single most vile person on the face of the earth.

He had more willpower than this.

With a flick of his hand, he pushed the faucet handle all the way to the left and stuck his hands under the water. Warm to hot to too hot, too much, and he watched the pale flesh at the base of his thumb and along his wrists redden in a flare of pain.

He was loyal to Carmen, with her sweet face and her buttoned blouses and her endearing blunt ruthlessness.

He was loyal to his own dignity, his principles, his self-control, and he had no
interest
in Ashley, but he knew what she’d be like. She’d be lewd. She’d be loud—outrageously loud—and he would hate it.

He would hate every second of it, just like he hated being trapped in this house, this swamp, with these awful people.

Mitzi stopped announcing her impending orgasm and started moaning, a sound beyond words that shamed him to hear. Shamed him to respond to that sound, to be pulling his hand from the water and pushing it, wet, against his disobedient cock through his cotton pajamas and his briefs. Willing this need to subside.

But the action gave him only thick, burning pleasure and bottomless guilt, played out to the sound of Kirk groaning
Fuck, fuck, babe
in the next room.

Roman couldn’t take it. With one hand, he untied his pajamas, shoved them and his briefs down and out of the way, took hot flesh in his searing hand for three slow strokes that made his eyes roll back into his head, made him go faster, a blurred fist and the other one wet, burning, the
pain only making the pleasure ache better.

He shouldn’t be doing this, so exposed, or at all. Not in the kitchen, because someone could come out. Someone might see, might
know
, and he had to go fast. Get it done before she caught him at it.

A door in his mind swung open, unlocked only when his cock was in his hand and his control was gone, vanished.

Behind it, his roommate at Princeton hunched on the couch with his girlfriend’s head between his legs, bobbing and glistening, his slack mouth wet and open.

Carmen, fifteen, dressed for the beach and completely off-limits—the bounce of her tits and the mystery of her pussy and the forbidden smell between her legs.

Roman’s first time, at a party, on a pile of coats with a girl they called a skank whose face reminded him of Samantha, and who let him fuck her without a condom even though it had been stupid, stupid—

Scenes from a dozen porn movies, paragraphs stolen from books, anger, power, slavery, abuse, captivity, all of it bad, so bad, but none of it sparked and his hand hurt, he
ached
, he thought for a second this might not even work—and then another door opened inside his head, and there was Ashley.

Ashley’s white ass tipped up, his cock deep inside her, her spine a runway for his fingers to travel to the back of her neck and hold her down, keep her put.

Ashley with her wrists chained behind her back and no T-shirt, just that blue bikini and mulch stuck to her legs, her burned cheek flaming pink and his cock halfway down her throat.

Ashley and her armpits, her armpit hair, her wrists pinioned above her head on the bed and her mouth, smiling, her breasts flattening against his chest as he kissed her and he fucked her and she wrapped her legs around him and pulled him in, into this heat hot wet guilt, unable to believe he’d even done it. This terrible thing. This betrayal.

Unable to believe it, unable to stop, unable to regret it or prevent his hand from stroking, stroking, weakening his knees and sending tremors through his arm braced on the countertop, forcing his wet mouth open in a soundless shout that hurt deep in his chest.

The house fell quiet, the silence like a death.

You’re sick
.

Never want to see you again
.

Something wrong with you
.

Always, always something wrong with him. Something broken that he could never fix.

But it was done now. He’d done it, and he couldn’t undo it. He could only draw a line under it and refuse to repeat it.

Roman tucked himself away and washed his hands.

The sun had begun to come up, lighting a glow out over the swamp.

He washed all the dishes twice, dried them, and put them away.

CHAPTER THREE

Ashley found Roman at the breakfast table.

Morning light came in at an angle through the glass patio doors and made his black hair gleam white, as though he had no color to him at all. Beneath the table, the bunched shapes of his calves were visible through his gray-and-white striped pajama pants.

Old-man pajamas. She bet he had the matching top in his suitcase—collared, with long sleeves and buttons. She bet he wore it, normally, but hadn’t been able to bring himself to put it on in Mitzi’s House of Carnal Hippie Sin.

The T-shirt he’d put on instead was green and surprisingly soft-looking. So was the curve of his neck as he bent his head over his cell phone. It unsettled her how much she wanted to walk up behind him and run one finger along the visible bumps of his vertebrae. Lean close to smell his warm skin.

Damn. Maybe her dirty thoughts last night hadn’t been entirely drumming-related.

She made coffee.

When she placed a mug on the table in front of him, he said, “The only tow service is a hundred miles away.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

“What do they do around here if a car needs towing?”

“Usually Jerry does it. He has a big truck with a hitch.”

“Bigger than the Cadillac?”

“Yeah, he could tow the Cadillac. Does it really need to be towed?”

Roman glanced outside. “The mud’s up to the axles, and it hardened overnight. It’s like concrete now. Plus, something’s wrong with the trailer hitch. It won’t unhook.”

“That’s probably just the pressure from it being jackknifed.”

“No, I’m pretty sure a piece got bent. It’s going to have to be cut off.”

“With a saw?” She imagined Roman kneeling in the grass, furiously working a handsaw. Sweaty and hot. Desire curled in her lower belly and started to purr.

Oh, fuck. Double fuck.

“I was thinking with a cutting torch.”

“Is this part of the trailer or of your car?”

“My
truck
.”

“Good.”

“No, I mean, I drive a truck. Not a car. It’s part of the trailer.”

“You’re not cutting anything off the Airstream. Do you know how hard it is to get parts?”

“That’s not my problem.”

“It will be if you cut something off my trailer.”

His phone made a noise, and he lifted it, dismissing her.

Ashley moved toward the stove. She opened a cabinet and pulled out wheat flour and agave syrup.

In Miami, Roman could have made arrangements for a tow truck and a cutting torch in an hour, but up here in Okefenokee people moved more slowly. Plus, everyone who didn’t have to work would be sleeping late after the drum circle—especially Mitzi and Kirk.

He was here for the morning at the very least. Maybe all day.

“Thanks for the coffee,” he said. An afterthought.

“No problem.”

But it was a problem. It was a problem that she’d made the coffee a little bit for herself and a lot for him, and that she’d served it to him, and that when he’d thanked her she’d started to hum with pleasure.

It was a problem that the pleasure had amplified when they started bickering and amplified even more when it sank in that he was stuck here.

Big problem.

She got out almond milk, baking powder, wheat germ, and cashew butter—ingredients for Mitzi’s magical morning muffins—and she told herself she wasn’t delighted he’d remembered to thank her, nor was she gleeful over the fact that he was stuck and couldn’t escape.

But she didn’t believe herself. Not even a little bit.

Triple, quadruple, quintuple fuck.

“How do I find Jerry?” Roman had gone even more tonelessly robotic.

“You’ll have to ask Mitzi. Jerry doesn’t have a phone, and he lives in his truck. He’s in
the swamp a lot.”

“Naturally.”

She got out a box of raisins.

“You didn’t have to clean,” she said.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

She cut her eyes in his direction, but he was looking down at the table, his body curled protectively around his phone, face averted to hide whatever this oblique reference to Kirk and Mitzi’s athletic rutting had done to his expression.

It was in his voice, though. A something. Discomfort, disgust, arousal?

Something.

It scared her a little, how much she wanted to see his face.

“You like tempeh?” she asked. “I think I’m going to make muffins, potatoes, and tempeh hash.”

“I’ve never had it.”

“You’re in for a treat, then. You want to peel the potatoes?”

“Not particularly.”

“You might as well. It’s going to be a while before Mitzi and Kirk get up. It’ll pass the time.”

She opened a drawer, found the peeler, and set it on the counter.

“If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll work.”

“Why not take the day off?”

He raised an eyebrow over one of those blank, empty, lovely eyes, then returned his attention to the screen of his phone.

She was starting to figure out his eyes. They went blank when he didn’t want to deal with some emotion.

She was starting to figure out, too, that he didn’t want to deal with
any
emotions.

For some reason the knowledge made her think about plucking the phone from his hand and doing a million dirty things to him on top of the table.

Also, his fussy-old-man pajama pants were kind of adorable.

She was colossally, magnificently fucked.

“Suit yourself,” she said.

He made a call and left someone a message about his schedule—move this meeting, reschedule that one for the afternoon, yes, he could do the two o’clock but not at that time, push it back a week, because he wanted to meet with the city planner first.

He tapped at his phone for a few minutes.

Then he got up and started peeling the potatoes.

“Thank you,” she told him.

“You’re welcome.”

Ashley chopped an onion and wondered how she was going to manage to shake off this fog of contented domesticity before Mitzi came out and caught her mooning over the enemy.

CHAPTER FOUR

The canoe slipped through water the color of milky tea, hemmed in on both sides by thick-based swamp-cypress draped with Spanish moss.

Mitzi paddled. Ashley sat.

I do my best thinking on the water
, Mitzi had said after breakfast, while Roman was still in the shower.
Let’s go. Kirk can distract him for a while
.

So they’d fled the house, and as they’d portaged the canoe from Mitzi’s garage to the muddy spot on the bank where she put it in the water, Ashley had filled her in on everything in one long, unpunctuated gush of unburdening.

She let Mitzi in on what a shock it had been when the lawyer called her to his office and told her what she’d inherited—or, rather, what she hadn’t. Her confusion and surprise when she’d learned that Sunnyvale wasn’t part of her grandmother’s estate.

She explained about the letter she’d gotten from Roman’s company by FedEx saying she had two weeks to move out, how she’d frittered them away crying too much and drinking too much and sleeping too late every day, until there had only been eight days left and she hadn’t known where to go to protest, so she’d gone everywhere and accomplished nothing.

She told Mitzi about the afternoon when Roman’s contractor, Noah, had arrived with demolition equipment, and how Gus had encouraged her to chain herself to the palm tree in the courtyard. The two nights she’d spent there, and how Roman had responded, and the hurricane. The bargain they’d struck to get her off the tree, the way she’d sprung the Airstream on him, their journey to Georgia.

By the time she’d finished spilling her guts, the boat was in the water, Mitzi was paddling, and Ashley was very tired.

“Let me think,” Mitzi said.

Ashley sat in the stillness and listened to the subdued sound of the paddle, the water knocking against the fiberglass boat, the swamp waking up—birdcalls, rustling sounds, croaking gators, splashing. She rested for the first time in what felt like ages, relieved of her burden because she’d finally,
finally
turned it over to someone better equipped to handle it.

Mitzi. One of her grandmother’s two best friends, and a frequent presence in Ashley’s life since her father had sent her to live in the Keys.

Susan and Ashley had always begun their annual summer road trip with several weeks at the commune, and Mitzi visited Sunnyvale every winter for at least a few weeks. She usually dragged along whoever her current lover was—Kirk had been the first one Ashley met, and her perennial favorite—and they all initiated him into the ways of Sunnyvale: happy hour, cards, ribald jokes, beachcombing.

Her grandmother’s directive that there be no funeral and no party after her death meant that none of her friends had come to the Keys to mark her passing, but Mitzi had told Ashley last night that she’d been aware of Susan’s illness and had visited her more than once in her last months. Ashley was afraid that if she asked Mitzi, she’d find out that she had known about the sale, too, and only Ashley had been left out.

She looked at the trees instead, and heard the broken bugling calls of a group of sandhill cranes overhead.

On her first visit to this swamp, when she was fourteen, Kirk had told her these were Seminole canoe trails, dozens of pathways they’d cut through the floating vegetation so they could attack government soldiers and then melt away where the whites wouldn’t follow. He collected tales about Billy Bowlegs, the Alligator Chief—a Seminole who had organized a resistance movement from deep within the swamp, gathering displaced Indians and runaway slaves to his cause during the Seminole Wars.